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1% Better John Sweeney – Quick Links

Learn more about Brave New Outpost
Check out Jiggly Boy video and donate to Smile Network
Get John’s book, The Innovative Mindset
Follow John Sweeney on LinkedIn
Connect with Craig Thielen on LinkedIn

Key Takeaways

• Importance of Improvisation in Business and Life: John Sweeney’s journey from comedy to the business world underscores the critical role of improvisation in fostering innovation and adaptation. His experiences highlight how being open to improvisation can lead to unexpected and rewarding paths in one’s career and personal development.
• The Role of Mentorship and Learning Environments: Sweeney emphasizes the value of finding great mentors and cultures that can teach you a lot early in your career. This approach not only aids in personal growth but also prepares individuals to navigate challenges and opportunities more effectively.
• Innovation Through Desperation: The transformation of Brave New Workshop from a comedy theater to a business innovation consultancy illustrates how desperation can drive creativity and innovation. This transition showcases the ability to create new revenue streams by leveraging core competencies and values authentically.
• Adaptation During Crisis: The COVID-19 pandemic forced Sweeney and his business to adapt rapidly to unprecedented challenges. His story of navigating through the pandemic, laying off employees, and rethinking business strategies highlights resilience and the necessity of adapting to change for survival and growth.
• Making a Positive Impact on Others: Throughout his varied career, John Sweeney has maintained a focus on helping others and making a positive impact, whether through comedy, innovation consulting, or personal interactions with notable individuals. His approach emphasizes the importance of community and support in achieving personal and professional success.

1% Better John Sweeney – Transcript

[00:00:07.450] – Craig
Hello, I’m Craig Thielen, and this is the 1% Better Podcast. Today is a very special episode of 1% Better. Improvement at its highest form is often called innovation or invention. Either by some brilliant design or necessity, and almost always by getting and being out of your comfort zone. Our guest today is, I can’t think of a better example, and I think it’s going to be really fun to talk to John Sweeney, who is the CEO and founder of The Brave New Outpost and previously the owner of America’s oldest comedy theater, the Brave New Workshop. And if you don’t know about Brave New Workshop, it’s based out of the Twin Cities, and just an amazing story in itself. It actually has some lineage to Saturday Night Live and fascinating story. John was such a big part of that for years. Then he transitioned from comedy into the business world or added that to his repertoire and worked with people like Microsoft, Target, Facebook, Apple. He even was on stage with the likes of George Bush, Deepak Chopra, Betty White, Steve Ballmer, Mark Zuckerberg… we’ll talk about that, that’s fascinating in itself. We got so many great stories about John.

A quote from his book appeared on a millions of Starbucks cups. He’s dance shirtless in front of probably millions of people, been on ESPN Sportscenter. He literally wrote the book on innovation called The Innovative Mindset. He not only talks innovation, but he has lived it in many ways. I’m very excited to dig into improvement today and innovation. Buckle up and we’re really going to get into it today. We’re going to get the mastery level of innovation today. John, welcome to the show… welcome to 100% Better.

[00:01:51.500] – John
Thank you so much, glad to be here. As you may see as you’re watching this, I’m here in an innovative way. I’m actually the cab of a large truck because the innovation of my internet company isn’t very good today. I’m doing this on the fly. It’s fun.

[00:02:06.610] – Craig
That’s the life you live. It’s all improv, and you got to take it one step at a time.

Let’s get started, John. The reason for the big intro is not to give you a whole bunch of creds, but I feel like all of those things are meaningful parts of your past and give you little clues as to the life experience that you have, which is incredibly interesting. Just walk us through how you got involved with this organization called The Brave New Workshop and how you got to run it and how that progressed into going outside of the comedy world, even into the corporate world.

[00:02:43.370] – John
Yes, I don’t know how interesting it is, but it’s certainly an odd story. I can’t say that I’ve taken a traditional or predictable path, and yet like an improv scene, you could look at an improv scene in the segments of little three to five-second chunks of theater that are all woven together like a string of pearls. In some ways, my life has been just one big improv.

I grew up on a dairy farm outside of Madison, Wisconsin. Large eight kids, Irish Catholic dairy farmers. Went to a small liberal arts Catholic college called St. Norbert, which is the St. John’s of Wisconsin. I like to say it’s a nice seventh choice if you get turned down by Notre Dame, Boston College, Marquette, Gonzaga… it’s a great seventh choice. But it was a great college. I loved it. Played some football there, which was fun. Then as odd as it seems, dairy farmers is the primary occupation of my family, but then everyone seems to be in real estate. I grew up in a family that talked a lot about commercial real estate. We owned departments and gas stations and all kinds of things. I came out of college in ’88, and I moved right to the Twin Cities because I thought it was a great town, and mostly because I found a boss who was in corporate real estate, but also was a teacher.

That was one of the greatest pieces of advice I got from my family is, for those first couple of jobs, find a person or a culture or a team that can teach you a lot. You’ll ultimately figure out how to make money and you don’t need a lot of money when you’re fresh out of college. So try to find those great mentors. I was able to.

[00:04:11.260] – Craig
Do that. That’s a pretty good piece of advice.

[00:04:13.970] – John
Yeah, and it was one of those where he was a full-time, it was called CCIM, Commercial Real Estate Instructor. I got the benefit of having the teacher of the class be my boss all day long. I just learned and learned and learned. I learned more than just corporate real estate. I think I learned a great deal about sales, about relationship building. It also gave me the framework, which, as you mentioned, really serves me now and has in the last 20 years as I took this improvisation comedy to the corporate world. I see a lot of folks who are doing art in the corporate world, athletics in the corporate world, whatever it is, they’re bringing other disciplines to the corporate world, but they haven’t spent enough time there to really translate it or at least make those dotted lines to what the heck does improvisation have to do with corporation, corporate leadership? I’ve always been grateful that I got trained the right way and our clients were large organizations, so I got to see how org chart works, how decision works, how politics work, how bureaucratic decisions can slow things down. I think I was learning a lot of innovation prohibitors at the time, just watching how they made their real estate decisions and that really represented how they made any decision.

I did that for six years and then was blessed to have a real close friend who many of you know by the name of Chris Farley. Chris and I, and Chris’s brothers and I all went to high school.

[00:05:30.820] – Craig
I had no idea. This is a new twist to the story.

[00:05:33.790] – John
Yes. That’s what drew me to comedy. While Chris made it on Saturday Night Live, that was an inspiration for me. He said, We were pretty funny in high school and you’re working pretty hard. I’m just having fun showing my butt crack with Patrick Swayze here, dancing on Saturday Night Live.

[00:05:49.760] – Craig
That was his first episode, wasn’t it? I saw that live. Essentially this even came up. You and I have never talked about this, but you’re cruising across YouTube. We just posted our first episode on YouTube. It’s actually Kelcey Carlson. And here comes the Chris Farley… a guy from a… You’re going to live in a van down by the river. That skit? That’s probably one of his most popular memorable skits and I literally watched that yesterday and just had side aches. I mean, it’s just no one could do that skit but Chris Farley.

[00:06:21.600] – John
Right. Matt Foley.

[00:06:22.880] – Craig
Matt Foley. There you go.

[00:06:24.680] – John
That’s named after a guy that we went to school with. Actually, he was a Marquette. Matt was the one that was always reasonable when the rest of us were not reasonable. That’s why it’s funny and ironic that he made that character Matt Foley. Chris was doing well. I said, Well, at least I’ll try this out. I started taking improv classes also as a way to have some fun. I was working real hard.

I’m 58. The movie that influenced a lot of people in my generation was Wall Street, and Glenn Gary, Glenn Ross, and those types of movies where it was all about harder, angrier, faster, and that stuff. I was living that life in many ways, and so I was taking improv classes as a way to also take a break, and it went well. When you come from a large Irish family, you’re improvising all the time, and humor was just such a big part of our lives. I think they always say comedy is tragedy plus time. Like large families, we had lots of sad times too, and we laughed to get through those times, especially on the farm. I did pretty well.

Then next thing you know, I’ve got this decision. This guy named Dudley Riggs, who started The Brave New Workshop in 1958, he saw me perform and he said, I’d like you to come and audition to be in my theater. I said, Well, that’s wonderful. I’m making really good money. I got an office on the 40th floor of the IDS Tower. I’m currently negotiating a big lease in New York for our firm here. What do you pay? He said, Well, it’s $200, but then you have to get your own insurance. I was like, A day? He was like, No, a week. I got a great gift at that time. The person who was running the firm that I was working for at the time, he just said, We all have these different itches as we go through life. If we don’t scratch them, they’re either going to go away and will have regrets or they’re going to show themself.

You’ve got this itch, you want to try this comedy thing. Why don’t you scratch it for a while? Maybe you’ll suck at it. You come back and corporate real estate is always going to be here. He gave me the gift of freedom of choice, that luxury of going and taking almost a sabbatical from the real world. I sold my house in Linden Hills and sold my car and took a job at the Brave New Workshop for $200 a week with no insurance. That was October 13th of 1993, and I gave it a whirl.

I did two years at the Brave New Workshop and then went down to Second City where Chris was, and I did two years down there. Then Chris and I and his brothers did a sit-com together called The Sports Bar. I got to be a guest actor on that. Then, of course, Chris, things were going great for him personally.

Right before he passed, actually, Dudley, the man who started that theater, said, You’re the only actor who has ever gone through a theater that it’s had some business experience. I’m getting old. Would you like to buy this theater? I said, Wow – What an honor to be able to buy the nation’s longest running comedy theater. I actually tried to have him sell it to Second City for a while, and that didn’t work out. I had experienced enough of Hollywood at that point to realize I didn’t meet a lot of people who had sustainable happiness and sustainable lifestyle. Right, and then I was going through my period in that time, too. So I got sober 28 years ago. So here I am, and I’m a couple of years sober, and I’m making some big questions in my life, and I’ve got this wonderful young lady that I’ve dated who knew me on both sides of my sobriety, and we’re thinking about getting married. She said, If you own a theater, you can perform anywhere you want. You don’t have to deal with Hollywood. So we bought the theater together, Jenny and I, on March 3rd of ’98. We didn’t get married until a year or about six months later. We bought a theater.

[00:10:07.070] – Craig
She wanted to see the cash flow and the….

[00:10:10.640] – John
Yeah, she had some pre-nupital conditions. We got married in ’98 and did some great things. We were able to have a theater on the Disney Cruise Line ships for three years. That was fun. We were able to open another theater in downtown St. Paul in the old Palace Theater. Jenny built our school of improvisation to 2,000 students. But lo and behold, about three years ago in the theater, that Internet thing came out and Netflix and Tivo, and it got really tough to own a theater. I think part of our innovation story is based out on survival, because, we lost a third of the theaters in Twin Cities in two years. They just went away. That’s how bad it was. You don’t see a lot of stories about it, but live theater got hit in between ’98 and 2001, really hard.

[00:10:59.930] – Craig
We had a great theater scene in the Twin Cities. It was one of the best in the country, right?

[00:11:06.100] – John
Yeah. I mean, second most seats per capita, New York is the only place that has more seats per capita. But all of a sudden, why would you drive in from the suburbs when you can Tivo things and all that? It got tough for a lot of years.

So that’s when we, out of desperation and survival, that’s when we decided to scratch our heads and say, Well, instead of going bankrupt, is there another revenue that we can create that’s sourced from what we believe in, sourced from what we’re experts in? Can we be authentic in it? And of all places, we found that in Jenny’s school. So we had a bunch of students at that point, and we just sat down and talked to them and said, Why are you taking improv classes? I was surprised. I thought the answer was B. I wanted to be more funny. I wanted to be on stage. Only about 10% of them wanted to perform. The other 90% worked at Medtronic, General Mills, Target, 3M, all the great companies that we have in the Twin Cities. They said the reason they were taking improv classes is because it was a great place to practice.
I said, Tell me more about that. Practice better public speaking, practice faster decision making, practice innovation. I said, Wow, we might have something. I started going back to all my corporate real estate, which was General Mills and Target and saying, Hey, you’re Chief Human Resource Officer. You’re a head sales trainer. You’re whoever you are, can I come and talk to you about how improvisation and this mindset of openness and this ability to make decisions a little bit faster, that might affect you in the workplace? Because I’ve got some research. I’ve got a lot of people who’ve been doing that, and I’ll buy you lunch. That’s where it all started. I think we’ve done about 3,300 keynotes and training sessions with 141 of the Fortune 500 since we started that.

[00:12:45.730] – Craig
It’s amazing. Yeah, and what a pivot. Who would have thunk, a comedy improv club gets into the corporate world? Then it’s actually how you and I met. I was going through a leadership development program, and we have all these speakers come in on different topics, and you came in as the innovation topic, and we all come in. Oh, this is going to be great. We’re going to learn how to do innovation. The first thing you said is, Hey, my background is improv. I’m going to have you guys do improv. Literally, the blood drained out of our heads. We’re like, You’re going to make us do this? We’re deathly afraid. You get us out of our chairs, you have us do some exercises. The first 10 minutes was frightening, but it was so eye-opening about what you can do and your self-limiting and how you can prepare and all the lessons that you taught on that. I just think it’s such a great thing, and I wish every corporation and leaders would go through that training. One thing I do want to go back to… Go ahead.

[00:13:47.270] – John
I was just saying in those early days when I met you for the first time, we were just doing it because we needed the work. But it was interesting. We learned so much in those first five years because at first, I couldn’t understand why would people be hesitant or afraid because I wasn’t. I didn’t have that greatest empathy.

What it did is it forced us to go and do the research, and that’s when we realized what this mindset was all about. The reason why people are uncomfortable doing improv exercise is not because it’s inherently dangerous, it’s because they’re in a mindset of fear. Really, for the last 15 years, that’s what we’ve been doing. We’ve simply been helping people get out of that mindset of fear and into a mindset of innovation. Recently, our work really has been called to help people get into a mindset of action because there is so much, Let’s wait till next quarter. Let’s wait till the market gets better. Let’s wait till after the war. So much hesitation, and people are still frightened to move forward. That’s where we are today.

[00:14:42.890] – Craig
Is there a way, John, and we can come back to this later, but is there a way that people can get that mindset, those self-limiting beliefs, and I can’t do this because I haven’t been trained, or I don’t know how to, or I’m not good at improv, or I’m not good at comedy or whatever their beliefs are, without actually doing it? Do you have to get into some course or class or practice it? Or can you intellectually get that?

[00:15:08.440] – John
Yeah, you can’t, unfortunately. One of the catchphrases we’ve been using for a long time now is there’s a difference between getting it and getting it done. It’s like anything else. I use sometimes some cheeky analogies, but if Medtronic or 3M wanted everyone instead of to go sell or to go innovate, if they wanted them to play the cello, that’s what their mission was. They bought everybody a cello, and they had a speaker come in on celloling, and they brought the seven habits of highly successful cello players. Then they said, Okay, go back to work. Don’t practice. Everyone is going to still suck at the cello. It’s the practice where it goes from the poster to the person. It doesn’t have to be improv exercises. You can practice innovation. You can practice this limitless growth mindset in lots of ways.

One of the most effective ways that I’ve seen is just to simply spend more time with children. If I’ve got any kids or grandkids, because a five-year-old is almost always in that sense of play and imagination. If you just jump in, and that’s usually a safe place to go and be an idiot with a five-year-old, what do you want to do? You want to pretend, Okay, you’re a cowgirl and I’m a cheese sandwich. Let’s go. They’ll just keep going. They’ll provide a mindset workout gym for you to practice that because that’s really, it’s actually pretty simple.

You’ve got these different processes in your brains. One’s really linear, logical, and one’s really creative and meandering and innovative. Well, after about second grade, we drastically stopped practicing working out the part of our neurology that’s flexible and nimble and innovative, and we spend almost all of our time getting good grades, figuring out what algebra is, making sure that our college essay looks good, and then doing all the things that are linear and logical. So it just makes sense to be innovative atrophy. There’s actually a really cool, it’s pretty old, but there’s a cool study that the space program did. They started in 1965 with 3,000 kids, and they followed them throughout their entire lives and kept testing them for innovation, creativity. And you should see that dip.

[00:17:09.390] – Craig
Don’t you think, though, that we systematically deprogram that out of kids in our school systems?

[00:17:15.680] – John
Yeah, we certainly… I don’t know if we do it purposely, but what happens is what we reward doesn’t include the creativity stuff. Like, Hey, you were thinking of seven different things in class today. Well, instead of going, Wow, you’re an innovative multitasker, we’ll say, Oh, you have ADHD, and so go to the principal’s office, you’re a dreamer.

That was one of the things when I learned about ADHD and all that stuff. It was clear that I had it. I was like, Now I understand why I’m so good at improv. What a gift I have. I really looked at it as a positive thing.

[00:17:51.010] – Craig
It should be a gift.

[00:17:52.110] – John
If you get linear, logical on the improv stage, the audience is like, We just paid 30 bucks for you to do exactly what we thought you would do. There’s no need for that. You’re always trying to find the exceptional or the odd. It’s been a great journey. It really has.

[00:18:08.350] – Craig
Give me just one last thing about the Brave New Workshop, then I want to move on to a couple other things here. What is the exact, beyond the Chris Farley connection, the lineage and connection between Saturday Night Live and The Brave New Workshop?

[00:18:22.650] – John
Sure. The Brave New Workshop started May 10th of ’58 in a small coffee shop on East Hennepin. Covid was sad for us in a very specific way. We had never missed a weekend of performances since May 10th of ‘58. Our doors had always been open. JFK assassination, Vietnam, 9/11… We had always brought laughter to the world. When we shut down, that was the first time in 62 years we hadn’t done a show that weekend. Where our connection to Saturday Night Live is when they were putting that show together, when Lauren Michaels was putting together the writers and the people who are going to be responsible for the content, he hired Al Franken and Tom Davis as the two first head writers, and he took those two folks right off our stage. But I think we’ve all figured out that politics and comedy doesn’t work together because Al’s not nearly as funny as he used to be.

[00:19:15.830] – Craig
It depends. Yeah. It’s interesting because both shows, I’ve been to the Brave New Workshop at least a half a dozen times. Of course, I used to be an avid viewer of Saturday Night Live, and they were both very political in terms of using politics as comedy, and that was their strength. It’s an interesting connection there for sure.

Well, let’s jump into something else that you’re incredibly well known for, and we can’t have a podcast without mentioning it, and that’s the Timberwolves playoff publicity stunt. It’s one of the all-time best marketing ideas, and not just idea, but you actually executed it personally. So just walk us through where that came from and what it was, and we’ll, of course, include the link on the podcast so people can watch it themselves, but walk us through it.

[00:20:07.650] – John
Sure. Back in the day, we used to work with, I don’t know, maybe 10 professional sports teams across the globe. What they all shared in common is that their teams weren’t doing very well. As a matter of fact, their teams weren’t doing well at all, which is why they’d call us. Basically, they’d say is, Can we use your combination of your innovation work and your business understanding and then your theater to create moments in our game so our guests can actually enjoy their time? Because they’re not enjoying watching that many losses. We were working with The Wolves and we’re making videos during the timeouts. We’re coming up with contests. We’re doing all this stuff. Yet there was still this challenge of, in my opinion, the classic governor on fun that Minnesotans allowed themselves to have at a game. We don’t want to have too much fun because… I mean, What would happen? We’d win, right? And if we won too much, we’d win the Super Bowl or whatever right?

[00:21:04.140] – Craig
It is the Midwest.

[00:21:06.070] – John
Yeah. We said, Well, what if? And then we did brainstorm a bunch of things. Someone in that brainstorming session, because we used to do some pretty robust, formal brainstorming sessions. I wrote a book called Innovation at the Speed of Laughter that outlines that process. Someone in the group said, Well, what if Sweeney danced with his shirt off and then the cops threw him out because he was literally having too much fun. I was like, That’s the stupidest idea I’ve ever had in my life because I didn’t want to have to go do it, right? Right. You’re like, No, remember, yes, and we have to yes, and everything around here. There’s no bad ideas. Apparently, the group outvoted me, and next thing you knew, we were dancing with a shirt off, and then we actually had two of our actors dressed as cops dragged me out of the game. And we thought it was just a bit we were just having fun, right? What we did know is these Minnesota fans who don’t want to cheer themselves, they’re very kind and loyal to others who will go and cheer for them. So they went nuts. They had 118 complaints during half-time of, How dare you throw that guy out, he was just having fun. So we didn’t know what to do. That wasn’t part of the plan, right?

So as improvisors, we worked with the Wolves, and we came back in the second half in the fourth quarter and the place went nuts. Then we danced with the dance line a couple of times that year, and we thought we were done. But then Minnesota teams, they have this ability to hire teenagers for millions of dollars, then let them go win a championship somewhere else, and then bring them back when they’re in their 60s so they can be a leader. They brought Garnett back, and Chris Wright, who was the President of the team, texted me and he said, Confidentially, Garnett’s coming back on Thursday. Does ‘Jiggly Boy’ want to dance again? I was like, No, no, no, no, no, no. Because I was already the first time I danced, and this was I was 50. I was like, First of all, sequels don’t work. Second of all, it’s not really funny. It’s just gross. It’s just gross. He kept pushing himself. I said, Well, can I have my sons dance with me? I think William was nine and Michael was seven at the time. We came up with a bit and we choreographed it. In the second half, we danced together and it made sense. But what we didn’t know is the Timberwolves came out of the timeout in record time. Garnett’s standing there. The place goes nuts because I was dancing there having a good time. I had Welcome Home KG printed out my chest. He notices me, and now we make eye contact, and now we have an exchange. It was just a lot of fun. That video went a little bit goofy. We got a million hits in the first day.

[00:23:42.240] – Craig
That was before such a thing is going viral. But you were on ESPN Sportscenter, and it absolutely went viral before being viral was a big deal. That’s incredible, right?

[00:23:52.240] – John
Yeah. It just keeps going. China picked up on it. We’ve got 250 million hits over China.

[00:23:58.250] – Craig
Unbelievable.

[00:23:59.690] – John
I think, as you know, the good news is once we knew it was going to be a big deal, we immediately created a partnership with Smile Network International. You can go to jigglyboy.com, and you can click on Smile Network and donate a dollar. As of this morning, we’ve funded about 420 cleft pallet surgeries for kids.

[00:24:17.240] – Craig
Unbelievable. That’s such an amazing thing, John. We will include that link and make sure we can add to that. Let’s take a little bit of a shift now. Your business was really doing quite well. You had expanded it in corporate world. Again, incredible stability in terms of keeping your comedy alive, but growing the corporate business. Then all of a sudden this thing came called COVID. All of a sudden, everything that you thought you knew and you had mastered and you got into some sort of ‘we know what we’re doing’ just went away and now you’re back going ‘what’s next?’ Let’s talk about that. How do you deal with that? That’s the biggest test of innovation. Again, you’re starting over, right?

[00:25:01.630] – John
Yeah. I’m still recovering to tell you the truth. It’s interesting to think that I guess come to terms with because actually, it’s interesting. Dudley Riggs’ wife is a tenured professor at the U, and she specializes in something called ambiguous loss. In other words, when things in our lives, like she works with the folks in Kosovo, 9/11 victims, when stuff just doesn’t make sense. It was a bit of ambiguous loss because if you think about it, when we bought the theater, we had four employees. It was a $250,000 annual business. Next that you know, with a lot of hard work and a lot of help from other great people, we had 110 employees. We had never owned any real estate. Now we own two beautiful buildings right on Hennepin Avenue in the middle of downtown. We had a revenue stream from ticket sales. We had a revenue stream from renting out the meeting space in that building. We had a revenue stream from three separate bars, from a school of 2,000 people and from 115 corporate engagements a year. We were actually at a place of entrepreneurship where we were stabilized. Now we had a large enough portfolio of revenue streams where we weren’t as vulnerable, at least we thought.

When COVID hit, I guess we didn’t know that we really didn’t have Achillies heel, and that was everything we did involved getting lots of people into a small room together. I laugh about it. It’s been a tough few years, but I don’t know how you could have ever strategized.

[00:26:23.100] – Craig
No way.

[00:26:24.970] – John
Also, when that hit, we lost a H in speeches. We shut down the school, we shut down the theater, we shut down the whole building all in a matter of three days. I’m just staring in the mirror going, Everything we’ve worked for doesn’t exist as of today. The good news is, I think all the things we had been creating and sharing with others were exactly what I needed to do at that moment. I needed to ask what else. I needed to say yes and I needed to fill myself with gratitude. I needed to ask what can we build and who can we help? Because we were a little comedy theater in Minneapolis doing some corporate speeches. There were billions of people in the world who had much larger problems than we did. There were companies much larger. There was also some business opportunities. What could we do? I learned more about green screen, large scale Zoom meetings in three weeks than I ever had. We pivoted pretty good. We study where the theater was closed for 30 months, but we were able to find a buyer for that theater, which is the Hennepin Theater Trust, which runs all the theaters downtown.

In hindsight, that would have been a great succession plan. It just got speeded up, so that’s a benefit. My point is, I think we did a pretty good job asking what opportunities were there instead of just looking at what couldn’t happen and what we couldn’t do. Yet it was tough times. We had to lay off people who had worked for us for more than 20 years. It’s interesting, you don’t hear this story a lot either, but theaters couldn’t get any PPP money because you have to be open for business to get PPP money.

[00:27:53.350] – Craig
Yeah, and they shut you down.

[00:27:55.000] – John
Yeah. You can’t even be in the theater, so I can’t pay you for anything. It would have been dishonest and the IRS would have came after if we would have said, Yeah, we’re taking money for this business that’s currently closed. It’s just the way that it was written. It was interesting, some of the hardest hit industries also weren’t available to get PPP money. It’s still tough even to talk about, especially laying off some people that I really loved and that had helped me build something. But I think it made us stronger. I think I’m 58 now, and so it was probably one of those I can’t see me being organized enough to have figured out what the 10-year succession plan. I probably needed a little bit of a hit on the head to figure out what this next chapter was. I’m glad that the theater is in a great place. Then what it’s allowed us to do is just really focus on this now kind of more tenured approach after 3,300 keynote speeches of how we can go into large organizations and help them with this mindset. Like I said, the most popular speech and training we’re doing right now is how to create this mindset of action because that mindset of fear wants you to stall, stall, stall. Everybody’s doing it.

[00:29:01.400] – Craig
Oh, my gosh. We see it every day, John. We live in the corporate world, and there’s so much. It’s interesting because there’s so many lessons learned from all around the world with COVID and what we could do and what we broke through our own mindsets. But it’s now we’re back to fear and we can’t do this and we can’t do this. It’s pretty prevalent.

have one question about that, and thank you for sharing. It’s a very tough story from like you said, you really care about people and you built this thing up over… It’s such a great success story. But all the techniques, all the mindsets and techniques that you used and you preached and you taught and you lived, I assume you feel like that’s what got us out of it. But was there anything that you added to it by just going through this as well? Or was it, no, we just got to go back to what got us here?

[00:29:54.740] – John
No, I think it was because in some ways it’s ironic because you have to behave based on the beliefs that you’ve been doing for 25 years, but then you have to reinvent yourself. There’s no really going back. There’s just whatever the next chapter is. I think we drank our own medicine, but I think maybe what helped us, because in some ways we were reinventing ourselves, we couldn’t really go back, was this as an improviser, I’ve always looked at my life and probably my business career as episodic. In other words, this is chapter and then the next chapter, and that’s how you build an improv scene. It was unexpected. If I looked to try to find what was wrong with it, I certainly could have found what was wrong with shutting down the theater and losing all this business. But as an improviser, you’re trying to focus more on what can you use to build, what can you use to move forward. We just did what we’ve always done. We just said, This is what we have? What can we build? Because as a trained improviser, you’re standing on an empty stage with no props, no costumes, no scripts, no rehearsals, and you’re always asking the question, What can we make from nothing?

I mean, you’ll compare it to an inventory or physical material or science or whatever it is, you don’t really have anything. We’re like, Well, what do we have? This was an interesting one. I don’t know if I’ve thought about this before. Probably the biggest thing that we had was this great relationship with all of our past clients. Thinking back to that first week, I think that’s the first thing I did is instead of sending out an email that says, What was us? We just lost all of the speeches. I just sent out an email that said, I’m so grateful for all the business you’ve given me in the last 20 years. How can I help you today? Don’t worry about fees. I just want to help.

Because I’m going to give you an example. We’ve done 200 gigs for Hilton Hotels. They need 62% occupancy to break even. In all of 2021, they were at 18%. Yeah, my theater was closed, but those are thousands and thousands of people who are losing their jobs. I just reached out to the CEO of Hampton, which was the brand we work with. She said, I have some time on my hands and I’d like to help you.

That’s the other thing, too. Remember, improvisers are always asking the question, What can you do to make everyone else on stage look better than yourself at all? Then I think coming from back to your first question of this crazy life I lived, how we were raised on the farm, what can you do to help others? Somebody’s always got it worse than you. Then I think selfishly, since I knew I couldn’t do much, I was feeling a bit useless. I thought, Well, if I could help our clients, that’s better than just staring at the wall wondering when you could open your theater. So all that helped. We did drink our own medicine, and then I think we did put into practice a lot of the things we talked about mindset.

I can also tell you that I understood for the first time in my life that sometimes in that last 20 years when I talked about, get out of a mindset of fear, get into a mindset of innovation. I was a bit Pollyanna and naive because I had been so lucky in my life that I hadn’t had a lot of times where I really was fearful or that life really did suck. I’d been a very, very privileged person. I could tell you now I have a much greater sense of empathy than those who were struggling. That’s been a gift.

[00:33:18.210] – Craig
It’s an incredible, I mean, it’s really an incredible story. I know how that feels. We do management consulting. We largely get hired to help our clients change. Sometimes we get somewhat repetitive and cavalier about it. There’s an old saying, change is like the rain. Everyone likes to talk about it, no one likes to stand in it. It’s very true. Applying change to yourself is one thing to talk about it and here’s all the things you need to change, and here’s all the things you need to change. But when you have to change yourself, it’s a whole different game.

That’s really an incredible story, John, thanks for sharing that. Let me ask you this. You get to share the stage. I mentioned a lot of really big name, like some of the most famous people on the planet. Who out of the people that you were able to do that interact with and be on the stage was the most fun, the most enlightening, the most memorable to you?

[00:34:12.350] – John
I’ll probably choose a couple. If I had to choose one, it would be Betty White. I got to spend an hour interviewing Betty in Grand Rapids, Michigan for a gala that benefited Gilda’s Club, which my wife is the founder of Gilda’s Club in the Twin Cities. It’s a place where you get social and emotional help for cancer. She was the guest of honor, and so they chose me to interview her. Then I got to spend some time with her beforehand and stuff. I don’t know if I’ve ever met anyone who is, I wouldn’t say identical, but almost identical on stage as she is off stage.. that level of… Then she was 90 when I interviewed her. I think you get to that age and in a good way, you don’t care anymore. You just actually live a life of honesty, that stuff. That was really cool.

The time that I was with Deepak Chopra and shared the stage with him, that was pretty cool from a spiritual standpoint. I was lucky enough to have met Pope John Paul II and the Dalai Lama in life. I met both those guys. They both had a sense of compassion that you feel that I’ve never met.

I had got to have lunch. I was the keynote speaker for the first-ever Facebook sales meeting, and so I got to have lunch with the Zuck [Mark Zuckerberg]. That was one of the most fun lunches of my life because he was so young and you could tell that someone in PR had been coaching him on how to talk because now they’re public. What he says affects stock price.

[00:35:39.570] – Craig
Absolutely.

[00:35:40.870] – John
But almost like someone who is bilingual, he would keep going back and forth from surfer California talk. He would say like, I really think if we can globalize our verticals, a synergy that could come from it, could create an ecosystem that could really add value, and then I’d just be awesome, dude. He would mix the two languages.

[00:36:05.600] – Craig
That’s hilarious.

[00:36:07.440] – John
That was fun. Then I got to spend a day with Sir Anthony Hopkins, and that was a special day because we were both at an event that celebrated sobriety. He tells the story publicly, so I’ll tell it. But that was when I found out that in the same year that he won a Tony, an Emmy, and a Golden Globe, or maybe three big awards, he tried to commit suicide twice in the year. It was a great understanding for me that the circumstances in our lives don’t always dictate the happiness and vice versa. Those type of things, again, you talk about a blessed life. When they shut you down for COVID and you know you can’t do what you do, you do remember all these wonderful people you’ve met and how they’ve influenced you and how they’ve touched you and how you can learn from their mistakes and from their wisdom and all that stuff.

It’s been a great ride. Currently, I get to know people like Beth Ford, who’s the CEO of Land O’Lakes. I think she’s an incredible leader. Every day I get to meet someone who I’m just impressed with. I had a lot of fun at Microsoft’s sales meeting. They allowed me to follow Ballmer, and they allowed me to make fun of Ballmer. I did a quick Ballmer invitation, which included almost passing out from being so loud and full of energy and also swearing a lot. That was a lot of fun. It’s been a great ride. I’m very fortunate.

[00:37:28.710] – Craig
Amazing, really amazing. Well, let’s wrap this up. You’ve really given so many different clues and insights. It’s actually have to reflect and download just your life experience, everything you’ve been through. But what’s your most practical advice to the non-superhero people like us out here, the people that don’t take their shirts off at Timberwolve’s Games and haven’t been on stage and haven’t done improv with Chris Farley, but just super practical advice. People that really want to change, whether it’s giving up drinking or some personal thing, or whether they want to just drive more improvement professionally, or whether they want to drive more innovation. How does somebody go about doing that? What would you recommend to them?

[00:38:15.990] – John
I think the first thing I would recommend is to do just a little bit, and you can do it online, a little bit of research on understanding how your brain creates your mindset. I will give you the full lecture, but you’ll understand clearly that the mindset is needed as an organizer of information so that we don’t go crazy. There’s too much information for us to sort. That mindset is either one that we consciously choose in the front of our brains, I’m going to be in a mindset of innovation, of gratitude, of happiness, whatever it is. If we don’t choose one that takes energy and effort to choose one, the brain chooses it, but the back of the brain chooses it, and it chooses the same one every time, a mindset of fear. When we understand that the neurology works that way, the next step is to understand that so if we don’t feel very innovative or we’re a little bit scared to do something and we’re hesitant, please don’t beat yourself up. Actually, be grateful that you have a fully functioning, really healthy brain. It’s doing what it’s built to do. And then gently ask it to chill out and bring that decision to the front of the brain and decide, I’d like to be in a mindset that’s what’s best for me in this moment. Like I said, the one that we’re trying to really help people out is this ability to take action.

We created a simple little phrase with the word TAP. The three things that I help people with in this mindset of action is create a timeline of urgency. You have to have a timeline of urgency. Think back to the improv stuff. We got three minutes to get this done. Timeline of urgency. Second is accountability to others. If we’re not accountability to others, we’ll just keep hesitating. Then the third is to choose progress over perfection. That’s where that mindset of perfection gets in there. But if we just TAP, timeline of urgency, accountability to others, practice some progress instead of perfection, that’s the way… Remember we talked about the beginning, you can know that. But if you don’t put it into practice every day, think of your mindset as a muscle. If you’re not working out that gem, unfortunately, no matter what you’re doing in life, you’re not going to be able to be in the mindset that’s against your default mindset.

[00:40:25.110] – Craig
Yeah, and that’s easy to remember too, right? Yeah. The P has actually got some wonderful 1% better into it, so I love that. Well, last question I’ll finish up with that I ask everyone on the show is, you were getting somewhat reflective talking about where you are in your career. You got a lot of work left and a lot of plans and ideas left. But fast forward, you’re talking to yourself when you were maybe coming out of high school or you have a grandson and you’d want to give a piece or two of life advice, not into all this improvement stuff, but just life advice. Anything else that comes to mind?

[00:41:03.090] – John
Yeah, I think as you get older, you realize that there’s happiness that is shiny things, whether it’s career success or money and that stuff. But I’m really starting to believe in this last part of my life that the real happiness and maybe the only happiness is when we decide to be a person of service. It’s interesting because it’s a bit ironic. The more we serve, the happier we are, which is in somewhat a selfish act. But I get asked the question a lot, What’s the silver bullet in life and stuff? I do believe this service to others, and it sounds so simple and so trite, but man, I’ve chased so many things in my life, whether it’s wealth or fame or importance or whatever it is, and none of them have brought me the true happiness of trying to help others. It lasts longer, it’s deeper, it’s easier. We’re in a world where there’s a ton of people who need help. It’s pretty easy. I decided last couple of years I went over to Warsaw, Poland, and I helped me feed people as they were coming out of Ukraine. You see a thousand people on a train that’s supposed to hold 500, they’re leaving their neighborhood because of bombs. They don’t know where they’re going. They don’t necessarily have the language. They’ve got their grandparents, their kids with them, and they’re hungry. That simple act reinforced to me that the happiest I am in my life is while I’m serving others.

[00:42:27.800] – Craig
Yeah, that’s very profound John, thank you for sharing that. And thanks for taking the time. Amazing story. There’s so many lessons learned for a lot of people. So thank you very much.

[00:42:38.200] – John
Yeah, no, I’m glad to be on the show. It’s a great show and just keep laughing. That’s all we got.

[00:42:43.140] – Craig
Right. Laughter is the best medicine, as they say, right? Yeah. All right. Take care.

[00:42:48.370] – John
Take care, everybody. Bye.